It must be a bad year for a lot of national chains. Just like Walmart and David's Bridal, Best Buy just announced a ton of store closures and Illinois made the list.
As Joe Dredge pointed out in his post yesterday, the last remaining Sears store in Illinois is closing. Their Schaumberg store, Illinois' last open Sears, is done in November.
No matter how you look at it, 35 percent is a huge number of small businesses that have either temporarily or permanently closed their doors because of COVID-19.